In this interview with Pacifica Radio and WBAI's Jack Shalom, Dennis Broe takes us into the world of Pornocopia in the latest Harry Palmer LA Mystery Thriller. We talk about how that world intersects with Iran in a blowback onto Harry's case, the way the porn and gambling industries have now seeped into every aspect of American life and about the false intimacy porn promises and the false profits gambling serves up as everywhere ordinary people in the country grow more desperate.

Support the show

In Culture and Barbarism 10 Dennis Broe and Toby Miller discuss Broe's new Harry Palmer novel Pornocopia while Toby recounts the atmosphere in Mexico in the wake of the American-gun-fueled narco attacks. We recount the many similarities between the above ground Hollywood industry and the now more popular porn industry and we look at the beginnings of Vegas, fueled by mob drug money, the Hoover Dam and Air Conditioning. Finally, we look at why Ian Fleming and Arthur Conan Doyle wanted to abandon their characters and why flawed characters are more fun to write.

Support the show

Has AI come to save the world, to destroy it or to destroy it in the guise of saving it?

Is AII, which supposedly enriches all our lives, a gigantic boon to humanity and/or a monstrous con where creators’ own work is fed back to them, a market bubble ready to burst as the last desperate gasp of Western capitalism and a devourer of water, electricity, oil and rare earth metals that threatens local communities and is part of a global grab of the world’s resources? On Culture & Barbarism 9 Dennis and Toby consider the range of these possibilities with special guest Joan-Pedro Caranana. We’ll look at this decidedly American phenomenon from our perspectives in Paris, Monterey and Madrid.

Support the show